Until now, most people have chosen their cell phones based mostly on hardware – what the phone looks like, its size, its functionality. All that is changing. People will buy phones based not on what they are, but on what they can do on the network.

As the iPhone App Store so glaringly proves, the more phones open up to developers, the more that allows users to do anything they want with their phones – much as we now do with our laptop computers.

The long-standing closed, limited, proprietary cell phone systems operated by VerizonWireless, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint are the walking dead – exactly the position the old, closed-off AOL found itself in when the openInternet took off in the late-1990s.

People want to have a big, open ecosystem that spurs invention and competition and odd little niches, much like the Internet itself. Ultimately, the wireless industry is heading there. In less than five years, pretty much all cell phones will be open systems that can download software off the Web and access anything on the Web.

You want to buy music for your phone? You can get it from any entity that sells it on the Internet. Want to turn your phone into a guitar tuner? Download any software from any maker that offers it.

Google wants Android to push the industry in that direction, and T-Mobile's phone will be a first step.